For this release, MyShake is available for Android devices; an iOS version is very likely to come in the future. When the sensors detect the characteristics of an natural disaster, rather than the normal handling and bouncing a smartphone gets, the location and magnitude are sent automatically to Berkeley.
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This app will rely on your smartphone’s accelerometer to determine when an quake could be taking place. “But we think MyShake can make natural disaster early warning faster and more accurate”.
For users relatively close to a temblor’s epicenter, seconds is typically all the warning they get with current technology. “You should download this app!” Designed in California and downloaded across the world, developers of the MyShake app eagerly await data from earthquakes. “We wanted an app that could collect the data needed, but wouldn’t lock up the phone, or use up all the phone’s memory, or burn out a battery, any of which would cause people not to use it”.
Researchers have made other attempts to harness the public’s computers or mobile phones for quake detection, mostly using their power-hungry connection to the global GPS network, but it has been hard to keep users, especially when software updates interfere easily of use. There’ll be minor bumps that could affect the sensors in the phone the app will read from, sure, but the app will be able to tell the difference between those. This algorithm was developed after many, many experiments replicating earthquake-like shaking at a range of magnitudes as various phones laid on flat surfaces.
When tested, MyShake could correctly distinguish between an quake and other motion 93 percent of the time, Allen said.
When MyShanke senses an natural disaster, it does two things.
Once triggered, MyShake sends a message to a central server over the mobile network. That data packet has the quake’s origin time, location, and rough magnitude. There are an estimated 16 million smartphones in California alone, and 1 billion worldwide, scientists said. This alert-feature is not on the app now, but will be added shortly as an upgrade. “We’re data-limited in our finds”, said Richard Allen, the director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory at the University of California, over the phone.
Following the initial alert, Allen says, your phone waits until it’s plugged into an outlet and connected to WiFi, then shoots off a larger data file. “And if there is actual shaking, accelerometers on the tracks stop them”, says Taylor Huckaby, a communications officer for the railway.
“This is a citizen science research project at this point”, cautions Allen. This type of phone-based data set will offer never-before-seen resolution of earthquakes as they happen.
All this is done in the background – much like health apps that monitor the fitness activity of the phone user. That new resolution could “allow us to image and recreate the rupture of an quake in a whole new way, allowing us to understand the strength that we end up seeing at the surface on a new dimension”, says Allen. For most users, a phone running MyShake wouldn’t need to be charged any more frequently than phones without the app, Kong says.
The app has a few other cool tools too.
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Progress on either side of the border supports the bigger picture of quake early warning, Moore said. So, we’re calling on you, dear readers.
